Integrating Instagram Onto Your WordPress Site

There’s no denying that Instagram has quickly become one of the most popular photo sharing and social networking sites online today. For those looking to integrate it onto their blog or WordPress website, however, Instagram does have a few drawbacks. Because it is mainly accessible through your mobile devices, it’s been difficult to share your Instagram photos on WP. Luckily, there are several plugins available now that make streamlining the two applications much easier.

Instapress

Instapress was one of the first full featured Instagram plugins on WordPress. The best part about using Instapress is that it gives you quite a few options for sharing your pictures. For example, you can place your Instagram pictures at different places throughout your WordPress site, make your pictures a widget, and even incorporate them onto your favorite templates.

Additionally, Instapress allows you to share not only your own Instagram feed, but other people’s photos and specifically tagged images as well. And because your images can be configured to appear as a gallery, visitors to your blog can click on them and see an enlarged version. This makes this plugin especially helpful for displaying products, services, and events.

Insta.SHOW

A simpler plugin for those that only want to display a running slideshow of their Instagram images is insta.SHOW. Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll have to enter your Instagram account’s login information. You can then use the application to choose the number, size, and location of your slideshow.

Instagrate

Another great plugin for incorporating your Instagram images onto WordPress is Instagrate. This particular plugin is ideal for those planning on using their Instagram account specifically to promote their WordPress site (or vice versa).

Install and configure Instagrate ahead of time, and then simply go ahead and take pictures as you normally would. Every time you use Instagram to upload a picture to the Web, your picture will also be published as a blog post on your WP site. This actually saves a lot of time if you’re planning on sharing the image on both sites anyway. No need to go through the process of uploading it in one place, then attaching it and publishing it on the other.

Not sure if you want to share every single Instagram picture with your WordPress followers? You can configure the plugin so that it defaults to saving each picture as a draft. This lets you publish them only when and if you decide to later.